The Council Needs to Hear from You!

The City’s Comprehensive Plan is being amended, and so far it doesn’t look good. BNCA President, Dan Schramm, gave testimony on March 20th before the City Council, as did Caroline Petti, former BNCA president. There is still time to submit written testimony. Use your own words or feel free to use the messages below to craft your own talking points and letters.

BNCA’s Position and Key Messages

BNCA believes the Plan is too important as a guiding document for the City to be weakened or allowed to become merely a tool of private development interests. We submitted a letter to the Office of Planning last year outlining our priorities for this amendment cycle of the Comprehensive Plan based on our community members’ input. We said we wanted the Plan to:

Continue to recognize Brookland as a stable residential and historic neighborhood that should be conserved in existing character

Preserve economic, racial, and cultural diversity and inclusiveness

Maintain and preserve affordable housing for all age groups and family sizes

What’s the Problem?

Unfortunately, the draft of the “Framework Element” – the chapter that sets the tone for the whole Plan – which was submitted by Mayor Bowser and the Office of Planning to the DC Council earlier this year, suggests that the current Administration is more concerned about making it as easy as possible for developers to build whatever, and wherever they want to:

The draft minimizes attention to the problems of displacement, lack of affordability, economic opportunity, and quality of life for existing residents.

The draft ignores the importance of green space, environmental values, historic preservation, and community and cultural continuity as markers of a great city.

The draft opens the door to out-of-scale overdevelopment in and adjacent to Brookland’s modest, low-density family homes, row houses, low-rise apartment buildings, and small businesses.

The draft weakens the Plan so that it no longer functions as a useful guide for agencies and courts in making land use determinations.

The draft sets the stage for eliminating opportunities for public input and community involvement in development decisions where we live.

These deficiencies in the current draft of the Framework Element will affect Brookland and the rest of Ward 5 disproportionately. According to the Plan, over the coming years Upper Northwest will experience more growth than any other area of the city. Ward 5 saw no less than 61 proposed changes to both the Generalized Policy Map (GPM) and the Future Land Use Map (FLUM). That is twice as many as any other ward in the City! Most of these came from private developers and property owners interested in building on their properties outside the scales currently contemplated by the existing plan. We don’t know whether the Office of Planning will accept these changes, but the Brookland Green, the 12th St. corridor, the Franciscan Monastery and Howard Divinity grounds, and other locations are all on the chopping block.

Key Takeaway: The scale, degree, and intensity of development allowed under the draft Framework Element could lead to a significant deterioration in the quality of life of all residents of Brookland. BNCA is not opposed to all changes to the Plan, and in fact we have proposed some changes of our own. But we believe the current draft of changes to the Framework Element is severely imbalanced and must be sent back to the Office of Planning to try again. It should NOT be enacted into law by the Council.

What You Can Do

Send written remarks to cow@dccouncil.us by 5:00 p.m. on April 3, 2018. Provide your name, address, telephone number, organizational affiliation (if any) and title. In order to ensure our Ward 5 Councilmember, Kenyan McDuffie, hears our concerns, we suggest CC’ing his official email address on any correspondence to the Council: kmcduffie@dccouncil.us.

Thank you for taking the time to join the fight to keep Brookland great!